Tag: Featured

AT GREAT universities like ours, the privileged children of alumni and faculty don’t need to bribe their way in—that’s what legacy admissions are for. Since the bribery scandal broke, plenty of ink has been spilled on the ethical implications of legacy admissions. Seldom, however, are the arguments in favor of legacy taken seriously: let’s break them down.

WE’RE ALL going to die and no one is doing anything about it. The response from our political leaders in the face of impending climate catastrophe has amounted to little more than cursory acknowledgement. Never mind the deniers—the 2018 midterm elections ended up running a large fraction of the true climate deniers in Congress out of office as part of an overall shift towards Democratic control of the House. It’s the rest of the political system we have to worry about. Even the politicians who believe in anthropogenic climate change have not made it a priority—they put out gravely-worded statements on the latest UN report, joked about the President’s misreadings of it, and went back to their signature issues. Climate change, if left unopposed, will transform the totality of life on earth. And no one really seems to care.

THERE WAS probably a time in your life, not too long ago, when “socialism” was a dirty word. For some of you, it never was—but for most of us, children of the children of Reagan, it was the symbol of unspeakable evil. So unspeakable that, come to think of it, we never really knew what “socialism” meant.

TRUMP’S ELECTION dealt America’s highly educated liberal elites their greatest shock in a generation. For decades, these elites seemed to forget the very existence of class, overlooking America’s increasingly vast income inequality – and ignoring those Americans who didn’t have access to the Harvard Club. Trump single handedly changed this. Although inexcusably racist and xenophobic, his success rested, in large part, on his ability to speak to the deep resentments of a right-wing white working class.

“FAIR AND BALANCED.” This, infamously, was Fox News’s slogan until June 2017, but if you put aside the obvious jokes about Fox’s conservative bias, “fair and balanced” sums up what journalism, ideally, should be. The concept of journalistic objectivity—that the facts of a story should be presented fairly and impartially—is among the first things taught in any introductory journalism class. It’s been the cardinal rule of journalism for about a century, which has been enough time for conservatives to figure out how to outsmart it.